Re: Drop the Copyright Assignment requirement for Emacs

[Arthur Miller]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > That does not make sense, if you want them to disappear we need to
>   > talk about them on how to replace them with open source tools, which
>   > is my goal in this discussion.
>
> Discussing how to replace a nonfree program with a free program (not
> "open source") is a useful thing to do.  This would not be the right
> place to discuss it, unless the program is closely related to Emacs.
>
> However, talking about _using_ the nonfree program is a different thing.
There are a lot of non-free programs which can't be replaced easily, at
least currently and it does not really makes sense to ignore them
either. For example I haven't heard or seen of free programs (in GNU
sense) that control life-supporting hardware for medical use, industrial
machines and robots, vechicle controlling systems and such. Sure one
could write such software but companies that produce the hardware does
not, and that will probably not change in very near future.

If people working for those companies or in activities involving such
hardware/software, say in some hospital, and would like to use Emacs (or
other GNU software) to develop possibly but non-necessary free or "open
source" applications to work with/alongside non-free what should they
do? Isn't it unnecessary hard on them to not be able to talk about
non-free software? Isn't it also a limitation on GNU software itself if
it can't be used in such cases as well as further inclination for
development of non-free software?